Miss Mildred's piano lies where the water knocked it down three months ago, amid ruined photographs and clothes. Her favourite chair is jammed in a corner; the wooden tiles of her tiny clapboard house muddy and peeled loose. There is nothing to salvage from a thrifty, industrious life, so she has come to see her home in New Orleans' devastated Ninth Ward for one last time.'I don't have anything to come home to. No food, no water or electricity,' said the 74-year-old, whose family has been scattered. 'I can't afford to live in the French Quarter and there is nowhere else to rent. I have three more years on the mortgage to pay for this.' She will not sell the property, she says, but she also will not return. And Mildred W Franklin is angry. In a city where the wealthy areas are buzzing with reconstruction, her neighbourhood, one of the worst affected, is silent and ghostly. 'They want us to be disgusted. They don't want us to return.'... http://observer.guardian.co.uk

An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda. ...http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1664612,00.html

Members of a neo-Nazi group staged a rally at City Hall on Saturday, two months after plans for an earlier march set off a four-hour riot in which a mob attacked businesses and police. Hundreds of officers stood guard to make sure there was no repeat of the October melee as about 60 white supremacists shouted at counterdemonstrators and held placards, including one reading: "White race, stand up and take back your neighborhood."Nearly 200 others showed up in the freezing weather to protest against the members of the National Socialist Movement.The counterdemonstrators, chanting slogans and carrying signs reading "Go home Nazis" and "Stop the hate now," were kept behind barricades about 75 yards from the area where the neo-Nazis were cordoned off.After speaking for an hour, the neo-Nazis left in a caravan of cars, escorted by several police cruisers. Authorities reported only minor arrests and no violence. ...http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-10-toledo-nazi-rally_x.htm?csp=34

Ten Afghan police and 11 suspected Taliban fighters were killed Saturday in two separate incidents in Afghanistan's southern provinces, officials said. Nine of the policemen died in the Garm-Sir district of Helmand province after their police post came under attack, Interior Ministry spokesman Yousif Stanikzai said. Ten of the attackers were also killed, the spokesman said. The other incident occurred in the province of Zabul when another police post was attacked by suspected Taliban insurgents early Saturday. One policeman and one attacker were killed, Stanikzai said. ...http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_1068045.php/21_killed_in_southern_Afghanistan_attacks

China on Saturday made its first official comment on a clash between authorities and demonstrators in a southern Chinese village in which an unknown number of people were killed, saying hundreds of armed villagers “incited by a few instigators” had assaulted police. Residents of Guangdong province's Dongzhou village, northeast of Hong Kong, have said authorities killed up to 20 people Tuesday when they fired on demonstrators protesting allegedly inadequate payments for land taken for a power plant. The province has formed a special group to investigate the incident, the official Xinhua New Agency said. It quoted the city government as saying that hundreds of villagers “incited by a few instigators” had violently attacked a wind power plant on Tuesday and assaulted police in a “serious violation of the law.” The villagers used knives, steel spears, sticks, dynamite, petroleum bombs and fishing detonators to attack the plant, Xinhua said. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/10/world/main1115796.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=World_1115796

A senior US official has defended the country's treatment of terror suspects and the transfer of prisoners to third countries for interrogation. State department senior legal adviser John Bellinger told the BBC Washington sought reassurance in those countries that prisoners would not be tortured. He said allegations that hundreds of suspects were sent around the globe to be tortured were "ludicrous". Poland is investigating reports the CIA ran secret jails on its territory. Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz ordered the investigation saying it was necessary to resolve the issue once and for all. "This matter must finally be closed, because it could prove dangerous for Poland," he said. A senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, Marc Garlasco, has said that until recently Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaeda suspects. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4515950.stm